So the most recent hype on my floor here at school has been the movie "Green Street Hooligans." This isn't really a new movie, but it has recently made its way into the movie collections of many of the guys on the floor and I haven't stopped hearing about it. As I had never seen the movie, and heard from many of my friends that it would be a movie I would like, I dedicated 109 minutes to what I can now see was the biggest waste of time that I have spent in a while (and that's saying something seeing as how I took chemistry last semester).
You see, from what I had heard about the movie from my friends, I was expecting to see something like "Fight Club," which is on my top 10 list of best movies ever made. I knew that the movie was set in England and that there was a lot of violence and fighting, so I thought it might be about feuding gangs in England, which would have been something that would've been interesting to see.
However, in actuality, the plot nothing of the sort. No, it was far worse. To give a short summary, the movie follows Matt Buckner, played by Elijah Wood, as he is wrongfully accused of selling drugs at Harvard, is kicked out, and moves to England to pursue journalism. Through family ties with his sister's husband, he meets Pete, who introduces him to a world he has never known. This is where the movie started to lose my respect. Pete is the leader of what he calls a "firm," which is pretty much a gang of obsessed soccer fans who like to trash talk other soccer fans and get into huge brawls all for the love of the game and their home team. You see where I'm getting at? To make a long story short, Pete's firm had accidentally killed the son of the leader of their opposing firm and is now involved in their own mini super-soccer-fan war as the opposing firms' leader seeks revenge by trying to kill Pete and his entire family. This plot was not only stupid, but the acting was terrible. I honestly couldn't keep a straight face as Pete tries to tell Peter that he should go back to school at Harvard rather than getting involved in the final battle between the "firms," that it was not his fight. There's no decision to be made man. Go back to America and go somewhere in life! (By the way, if you're going to make an action movie, don't cast Elijah Wood as your main character. The kid is so small that I could use him as a soccer ball. There's a reason he was casted as a hobbit in "Lord of the Rings").
While these sorts of fights and the inclusion of soccer seemed to win over the love of all my floormates, I could not help but become very disappointed. I mean is fighting and senseless violence really all it takes to win over the teenage boy crowd. The plot was absolutely rediculous. These hormonal firms where took a good sport way too seriously and decided it would be a good idea to beat and kill other super-fan firm members all for their hometown soccer team. The players probably didn't even take the game that seriously. And while my friends around me where "oooing" and "aaahhhhhing" all around me as someone gets a glass bottle shoved through their neck or gets their face bashed in by a brick during a brawl, all I can thing about is that guy's family at home; his wife or son or daughter who is wondering why their father isn't home eating dinner with them rather than spending all of his time fighting and killing for a silly game. How pathetic. It's movies like this that inspire Cubs or Sox fans to take baseball way to seriously and brawl it out during a Cubs/Sox game at Wrigley. It's movies like this that show that no matter what happens, even if every war was to come to an end, the people of the world will always find reasons to kill each other. This movie gets an F- in my book.
No comments:
Post a Comment